Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Oriental Institute Museum houses a large collection of nearly 900
Demotic ostraca, pottery sherds upon which ancient scribes recorded a
wide variety of text types. The vast majority of the corpus concerns
economic matters and consists of receipts, contracts, memos, and lists,
but there is a small selection of other genres such as votive and
astrological texts. With few exceptions, the material derives from the
environs of Thebes and over half of the collection derives from the
Oriental Institute excavations at Medinet Habu. Attested dates in the
documents range from the early Ptolemaic Period (circa 285 B.C.E.) to
the early Roman Period (circa 80 C.E.). Less than one third of the
corpus has been published:

Several dozen ostraca have been published in the articles of Ursula Kaplony-Heckel and Otto Neugebauer

The O.I.D.O.O database was developed as both a scholarly
research tool and a means for the publication of the unpublished
Oriental Institute Demotic ostraca. It is our aim to make available all
of the Demotic ostraca in this collection, both published and
unpublished, to scholars worldwide in a format that will allow for
complex searching and sorting criteria as well as quick and easy
updating. This will be accomplished through periodic updates as
additional texts are edited and entered into the database.

The focus of the ANEM/MACO series is on the ancient Near East broadly construed from the early Neolithic to the Hellenistic eras. Studies that are heavily philological or archaeological are both suited to this series and can take full advantage of the hypertext capabilities of "born digital" publication. Monographs as well as multiple author and edited volumes are accepted. Proposals and manuscripts may be submitted in either English or Spanish. Manuscript proposals are peer reviewed by at least two scholars in the relevant area before acceptance. Publication of the finished manuscript is contingent on a second round of peer review.

Monographs that are entirely Assyriological, Hittitological, or Egyptological are as appropriate to this series as are monographs in North West Semitics or Biblical Studies.

Given the open-access availability of published monographs (in PDF), publishing your work in this series guarantees its availability to scholars around the world, even to those with minimal economic resources.

Archaeological Reconnaissance of Uninvestigated
Remains of Agriculture (AROURA) is an archaeological geophysics and
surface survey of the plain around the 13th century BCE fortress of
Glas, Boiotia, central mainland Greece, beginning in October 2010 and
lasting until November 2012. It aims to detail the Mycenaean hydraulic,
drainage, and land-improvement works around the fortress, and to search
for traces of the expected extensive agricultural system they served.
AROURA is an official collaboration between the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County (UMBC), and the 9th Ephorate of Prehistoric and
Classical Antiquities (IX EPCA) of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and
Sports, based in Thebes, Dr. M.F. Lane (UMBC) and Dr. A. Charami (IX
EPCA) co-directors.

AROURA 2010 Preliminary ReportNote: Upon further
analysis, the band of silty soil mentioned on p. 21 is now thought to
represent an area of land more often above water than the surrounding
territory, after the reflooding of the Mycenaean polder (August 2011).

This series, edited by W. Clarysse (K.U.Leuven), M. Depauw
(K.U.Leuven), and formerly also the late H.J. Thissen (Universität zu
Köln), aims to provide freely downloadable pdf-documents with scholarly
tools based upon or providing links to the Trismegistos database.

Contributors can send in manuscripts in Word format to mark.depauw@arts.kuleuven.be.
The editors will decide whether the manuscript fits in the series and
can be accepted for reviewing. An anonymous version of the manuscript
will then be sent to two or more peers for evaluation. On the basis of
their report the editors will take a decision whether to publish it in
the series or not. Authors will be given the anonymous notes of the
reviewers and can be asked to implement changes to their manuscript.

DownloadTerms of UseThis companion volume to the exhibit of the same name examines the
multicultural city of Fustat, capital of medieval Egypt and predecessor
to modern Cairo. It explores the interactions of Muslim, Christian, and
Jewish communities within urban city life. These three communities
practiced their own beliefs and enacted communal self-government, but
they also intermingled on a daily basis and practiced shared traditions
of life. Essays by leading scholars examine the different religions and
languages found at Fustat, as well as cultural aspects of daily life
such as food, industry, and education. The lavishly illustrated catalog
presents a new analysis of the Oriental Institute’s collection of
artifacts and textual materials from 7th through 12th-century
Egypt. Highlights include documents from the Cairo Genizah (a document
repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue as well as never-before-published
artifacts from archaeological excavations conducted at Fustat by George
Scanlon on behalf of the American Research Center in Egypt. The volume
encourages discussion on the challenges of understanding religion
through objects of daily life.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Introduction: Reconstructing Everyday Life at Fustat. Tasha Vorderstrasse and Tanya Treptow
1. The Muslim Community of Fustat. Jonathan M. Bloom
2. The Oriental Institute Genizah Documents: A Glimpse of Jewish Life in
Medieval Cairo. Michael G. Wechsler and Tasha Vorderstrasse
3. Christians of Fustat in the First Three Centuries of Islam: The Making of a New Society. Audrey Dridi
4. Fustat and Its Governor: Administering the Province. Arietta Papaconstantinou
5. Industries, Manufacturing, and Labor. Maya Schatzmiller
6. Linguistic Diversity at Fustat. Tasha Vorderstrasse
7. Childhood at Fustat: Archaeological and Textual Sources. Tasha Vorderstrasse
8. From Fustat to Palestine: Identifying Fatimid Jewelry Using the Genizah Documents from the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Ayala Lester
9. Fustat: The Town, Its Inhabitants, Their Food. Paulina Lewicka
10. Observations on Antiquities in Later Contexts. Vanessa Davies
11. Fustat to Cairo: An Essay on “Old Cairo.” Donald Whitcomb
12. A History of Excavations at Fustat. Tanya Treptow
Catalog
Concordance of Museum Registration Numbers
Checklist of the Exhibit
Bibliography

Oriental Institute Museum Publications 38

Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-1-61491-026-8

Pp. 232; 185 illustrations

9 x 11.5 inches, paperback

$29.95

For an up to date list of all Oriental Institute publications available online see:

The Czech Institute of Egyptology has organized an international
conference Profane landscapes, sacred spaces, which took place on 26th
and 27th June 2014 at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. The
aim of the meeting was a discussion of the issues connected to
environment development and climate change research in Egyptology, and
to the ways ancient Egyptians reflected their environment and created
sacred spaces within the natural landscape.

John Gordon Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (1908 and 1915)

John Gordon Lorimer’s monumental
Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia – often simply referred to as ‘Lorimer’ by many researchers - has been digitised and is now accessible for free through the
Qatar Digital Library.

The
Gazetteer’s first volume, the historical section, is divided into three parts:

Part I (IOR/L/PS/20/C91/1), the ‘Arabian portion’, covers the general history of
the Persian Gulf, with histories of the Arab littoral, Central Arabia, Oman and Turkish Arabia (Iraq);

Part II (IOR/L/PS/20/C91/2), ‘the Persian section’, covers the history of the Persian
littoral, including Arabistan and Makran. In addition, nineteen
appendices cover subjects from pearl fisheries to the slave trade. Of note is
Appendix P,
‘Cruise of His Excellency Lord Curzon, Viceroy and Governor-General of
India’, an official account of the 1903 vice regal tour of Persian Gulf
ports;

Part III (IOR/L/PS/20/C91/3) consists of twenty-one genealogical tables for the ruling
families of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia.

The
Gazetteer’s second volume (IOR/L/PS/20/C91/4)
is the ‘Geographical and Statistical’ section and includes alphabetical
entries for tribes, towns and regions, from ‘Abdalilah to
Zubārah. It also contains fifty-six reproductions of photographs taken
by British colonial officers, but also German explorer, Hermann
Burchardt, and Raja Deen Dayal and Sons, official photographers to the
Viceroy of India.

The
Gazetteer includes two maps: a chart of
pearl banks on the Arabian littoral of the Persian Gulf included
with the genealogical tables; and a large ‘Map of the Persian Gulf,
’Omān and Central Arabia’ (IOR/L/PS/20/C91/6)
produced by Lieutenant Frederick Fraser Hunter in consultation with Lorimer.

[n.b.: The links are for the live webcasts, so will be open and accessible when the talk is actually happening (and most haven't happened yet!). Edited podcasts will be made available of talks that have already happened, in due course, and new links will be provided for those as they become available. ]

Ancient
History Seminar, Hilary Term 2015
Faculty
of Classics, University of Oxford

A
series of seminars looking at a number of current major projects
to apply digital techniques to the study of the ancient world. These
seminars will be webcast using the Panopto software. To view the
webcast, please click on the individual link provided under the
date of each seminar. The link will go live at 17.05 GMT in each
case. When viewing the webcast in your browser, you will see both
speaker and the speaker's slides together by default, but you can
switch either speaker or slides to full screen. The software works
best with Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

All
talks start at 5pm, and are followed by discussion and drinks.
If you wish
to dine with the speaker afterwards, at a local restaurant, please
contact the convenor : jonathan.prag @ merton.ox.ac.uk.

The mission of AntiquityNOW is
to raise awareness of the importance of preserving our cultural
heritage by demonstrating how antiquity’s legacy influences and shapes
our lives today and for generations to come.

AntiquityNOW carries out its mission through public engagement,
educational programs and advocacy on behalf of our collective world
heritage.

The goal of AntiquityNOW is to illustrate that humankind’s
commonalities are stronger than its differences, and to share this
knowledge to promote mutual understanding, tolerance and peaceful
co-existence among our global family.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Here's a bunch of OCR'd Latin texts from the Internet Archive used in our JCDL 2011 and JoCCH 2012
papers (see below). These are all texts that have been identified as
being written primarily in Latin (via automatic language ID on the text
of the book + manual confirmation). The data released here consists of
the entire books, not just the Latin portions (though the Latin parts
can easily be extracted by running language ID (e.g., langid.py) on them.
What's useful about this data is:

The metadata for these volumes contains not just the date of
publication for a specific edition of a work, but a window for the date
of composition as well (as determined by undergraduate students in
Classics; see JCDL 2011 for more details), which enables historical
analysis that the date of publication can't. The metadata may have a
few errors and style differences between the different annotators, but
I'm putting it up on Github for version control if anyone spots mistakes
and wants to correct them.

Data

All texts in DJVU XML, with formatting for paragraph/line breaks, etc. (9GB) [Download]

Metadata [Github repo].
For those who'd like to contribute, an additional 10,248 likely Latin
texts from the Internet Archive await estimation of their date of
composition in that repo (and we can add those texts to the corpus once
they've been dated.)

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.